Ever day someone somewhere in the world is quoting me.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Some people, after having read a book, quote certain passages which they do not thoroughly understand, and moreover completely change their character by what they put in of their own. Those passages, so mutilated and disfigured that they are nothing else but their own expressions and thoughts, they expose to censure, maintain them to be bad, and the world agrees with them; but the passage such critics think they quote, and in reality do not, is not a bit the worse for it.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

My words itch at your ears till you understand them

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in a world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority

They find me odd, and whisper behind hands…And my brutal desires sink hooks into their lips…

For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me.

I think quotes are very dangerous things.

I understand what lies hidden beneath beguiling words. I understand the trap beneath extravagant words. I understand the deceit beneath depraved words. And I understand the weariness beneath evasive words.

I think of quotes as mini–instruction manuals for the soul.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

If poets use such expressions it is because they need them, because emotion and experience force them out of them, and so it is, surely, with me, though you think them unbecoming in me. You are wrong. They are becoming to whoever needs them, and he has no fear of them, because they are forced out of him.

Be careful — with quotations, you can damn anything.